Timeless Imprisonment
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: As she escapes Gallifrey after encountering the Master, the Doctor is overwhelmed by everything she has just discovered. How much more can she take? Spoilers for "The Timeless Children."


Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who.

While I'm glad the season is over, I feel there are still questions that need answering. In the meantime, enjoy.

The Eleven was a Time Lord whose previous lives bled into his own until he argued with himself all the time, and the Ravenous were a race of beings who fed on Time Lord regeneration energy.

Please let me know what you think.

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Timeless Imprisonment.

The Doctor frantically worked at the TARDIS controls to get the ship into the Time Vortex; she honestly had no idea when Ko Sharmus would detonate the Death Particle, so she had run as fast as she could through the ruined corridors of the Capitol towards the bay where she'd found and sent off her friends in that TARDIS, but she guessed the old human resistance fighter would have no qualms with destroying the CyberMasters and their twisted creator.

Unlike her.

With a sigh of relief, the Doctor got the TARDIS into the Vortex just as the sensors picked up the blast.

The Doctor sagged on the console and closed her eyes, listening to the beautiful sound which she'd always enjoyed hearing, the sound of the dimensional stabilisers as they cycled with the engines. She hadn't bothered setting the controls yet, but she had plenty of time to do that.

At this moment, all she wanted to do was think. Think and curse herself for being a coward.

That was all she was, really; yeah, she could run around like an idiot, talk fast, get herself into a disaster, take over because she was using her intelligence, but really all she was doing was making a situation more hazardous.

She'd done it again.

She had hesitated to take action, and it had nearly cost the universe everything. Why, why did these things even happen? Why was she always prepared to go through with her decisions, and yet when the time came she never actually did it?

Sometimes the Doctor wondered if the Universe deliberately enjoyed making her repeat the same mistake over and over again. Ever since her fourth incarnation had botched in the mission handed over to them on a silver platter to end the Daleks and change history forever so they never existed, the Doctor had seen the mistake and cursed the action, but none of their incarnations ever followed through with the decision to end it.

In her fifth incarnation, she'd had the chance to finish Davros when she'd met the Kaled Scientist on that space station when his creations had gone to get him out so then he could cure them of the Movellan virus. What had she done? She hadn't killed Davros, and as a result, he had gone on to kill more and more people. She'd had the chance to kill one of the biggest, most insane criminals in the universe. And she hadn't gone through with it when someone like the Master would have done.

Her seventh incarnation had always been the man with the master plan, only she doubted he would have followed through with the chance to kill the CyberMasters, even if he had seen the bigger picture. In her tenth incarnation, she remembered how she had arrived on Stahl's ship with the device to reverse the damage the Sontarans had done to the atmosphere when they had planned the creation of a clone world. She had stalled, telling the Sontarans she would detonate the device. In the end, Rattigan had taken her place, doing what needed to be done.

And now this.

And it wasn't just not going through with the right choice. How many times had she made a mistake others had paid the price for? Her mind went to the time where she had given _the Eleven_ a chance after he had seemingly turned over a new leaf, only to find he was allied with the Ravenous! And then, not learning from the mistakes of her past, her predecessor had tried to rehabilitate Missy. Now she knew it was a complete and utter waste of time.

The Doctor had already made a number of mistakes in her current life. So far, one of her biggest was opening up Rakaya's prison. Why? She hadn't used her common sense and hadn't researched the legend properly. As a result, the entire human race was endangered by her reckless curiosity. But now the Doctor knew her biggest failing; she was still a coward.

No.

She was more than that.

She should have told her friends about what had happened to Gallifrey ages ago. She should have stopped hunting down the Master; she knew he would turn up again at some point anyway, and she should have focused on the Lone Cyberman before he was a major threat. It was like a repeat of the mess with the Silence and River Song, all over again. The Doctor had known a little girl had been at the heart of the Silence's sick plans, but instead of going after her, she had decided to go on adventures. Why hadn't she focused on the Cyberman? If she had gone after him, researched whatever it was that had been sent back in time, none of this would have happened.

But no. She had been more interested in hunting down the Master and discovering what the bastard had done to Gallifrey, and why. She wasn't going to trust the message from a two-minute holographic message. No way.

And the result?

A good man had died because she hadn't taken care of the threat she could have dealt with easily had she just taken the immediate threat of a Cyberman seriously. And it was all her fault.

The Doctor opened her eyes and she turned to face the navigational controls, and she set them to follow the wormhole the Master had opened between Gallifrey and the Refugee world she and her friends had found those survivors of the Cyber-War so she could retrieve her own TARDIS. It took her only a few minutes to set the controls, and she engaged the drive system. She stepped back from the controls, and she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, letting a slow sigh escape her lips.

She was exhausted. The fight with the Master, all of those revelations about the Timeless child, of that early Gallifreyan explorer who'd left home and explored the cosmos before discovering that child underneath that rift into a different reality, being told that she was the Timeless Child who had apparently had separate lives to the ones the Doctor remembered.

And the Timeless Child was the reason why Time Lords had the power to regenerate. The Doctor wondered if that was actually true. What about Artron?

The Doctor had always thought the legendary scientist and pioneer of Gallifrey had been the one to discover regeneration. Maybe he had; he had certainly discovered an energy even though another incarnation of the Master had messed things up and created the Ravenous!

Maybe, back then, Rassilon and the other Founding Fathers had been trying to come up with another means of regeneration, using something found in their universe while using DNA harvested from the original Timeless Child to complete the mechanism.

_Harvested. _

Somehow….her DNA was in every single Time Lord.

And the Master had gone mad with rage when he'd made the discovery, and he'd wiped out the Time Lords as a result.

The Doctor didn't know, but she wondered if she would ever discover the truth. But at the same time….the Doctor felt as if a mystery which had been on her mind for centuries ever since that battle with Morbius on Karn back in her fourth incarnation had been answered after so many centuries.

The Doctor had always wondered after being engaged in that mind-bending round with Morbius who those faces were. She had known from the off they weren't Morbius. Okay, at first she had thought they were Morbius' lives, but she had quickly realised the truth.

Morbius had been a new blood, a Time Lord who had been able to choose his regenerations and his appearance. The Master was another. Time Lords who were new bloods were able to choose their faces, and they invariably bore the imprint of their minds. Those other lives were not Morbius's former faces, so who were they?

The Doctor remembered brooding over it after she and Sarah had left Karn when they had helped the Sisterhood restore the Sacred Flame, but the only explanation she had was that she was actually the clone of another Time Lord who'd thrown themselves into her family's Loom. She had heard it said there were some Time Lords who had done that in order to give themselves a new regeneration cycle, or maybe because they had been criminals and they had wanted to escape. At the same, the Doctor had wondered about the truth, but she had decided at the time it made no difference since she was her own person.

Oh, how naive she had been back then. Okay, granted, the Doctor knew there was likely not a great deal her fourth incarnation could have done in order to find the truth. In any case, there were dozens of Time Lords who were 'descended' from Loom jumpers. It wasn't common, but it was perfectly normal in Time Lord culture.

Had the 'Ruth' her been one of those incarnations? The Doctor closed her eyes and groaned as another question joined the others in her head, but she was grateful for that incarnation's help in getting her out of the Matrix in order to stop the Master. Only she hadn't. Her old friend had known she would never have detonated the bomb. Even when he was goading her, she wouldn't go through with it.

The Master had once more created horrors, only this one made even what he had done with the Eminence and the Toclafane like a broken finger in comparison. He had taken Time Lord corpses and he had created an army of Time Lord Cybermen who had the power to regenerate.

It wasn't just sick.

It was pure evil.

Just like the Master. She had accepted the truth, as much as she'd love to deny it like she had denied the Matrix.

The Master was irredeemable. Everything he had done on Gallifrey, destroying the Time Lords and using their bodies for experimentation…it just proved that her old friend was gone. He would never come back.

She had no intention of reliving the same mess her predecessor had gone through with Missy.

No. The boy she had known was gone. Her best friend from Gallifrey was gone, and he was nothing more than a monster now. Evil, callous, destructive.

The Doctor had lost her fourth, seventh, tenth, and twelfth incarnations because of the Master. She was not going to give him a chance like that again, ever.

The Doctor lifted her head and checked the navigational instruments. The TARDIS was nearly at the Refugee planet, but her head was still swirling. It had been a blow to discover she'd had lifetimes before her remembered lifetimes, but at the same time, she was glad she knew more of herself than she'd ever done before even if she was still stunned she had once led numerous lives God knew how many times over.

Rassilon, her head _hurt _with everything that was happening around her.

She sighed as the questions she had in her mind kept coming around, and she wondered to herself once more why the Time Lords had redacted so much of the Timeless Child from the history of her people. Had they done it because they wanted the Time Lords to seem like a species who had just discovered regeneration? Why…?

Oh, who was she kidding?

She doubted she would ever get the answers to her questions any time soon. Unless she nipped back into the past and confronted this Tecteun in the story, and got some answers out of her, but unless she wanted to badly cripple the TARDIS by sending her into the pre-time it wouldn't happen.

The Doctor smiled when she heard the sound of the TARDIS materialising. She was about to open the doors out of habit, but she saw the instruments and she saw there were plenty of Cyberman signatures, but they were luckily all dead.

She sighed and she opened the doors, smiling as her fingers brushed over the rough bark outer shell as the chameleon circuit had assumed the shape of a tree.

"Oh, yeah nice!" the Doctor smiled as she examined the TARDIS. "Good chameleon circuit. I'm gonna have to leave you there, though," she apologised as she walked away, trudging slowly and tiredly back to where she had landed her own TARDIS, recognising the landscape easily. "I can think of worst places to spend eternity."

She smiled when she saw the familiar police box shape of her TARDIS. But as she approached, she wondered to herself if the TARDIS she had seen her 'Ruth' incarnation and hers was one and the same; she'd gotten the same familiarity when she had been in that ship, but the thought of her TARDIS and that TARDIS made her think. Was that the reason why their bond was so strong because this TARDIS had known her first self for what it was?

The thought made her wonder how much of her lives had been manipulated, but she hoped the TARDIS would allow her to unlock more home truths about herself. But at this point, all the Doctor wanted was to leave this era, get to her friends and just find a place where she could relax now this mess was over with

She rested an affectionate hand on the outer shell, smiling when she felt and heard the powering hum. "Hello, mate," she greeted the time machine; part of her wondered how much time had passed, but that was unimportant for now.

She smiled as she opened the TARDIS and stepped inside. The interior was dark but as she stepped inside, the lights came on as she walked towards the console.

"Thanks. Home sweet home," the Doctor said as she walked to controls, smiling when she heard the warbles from the console. "We got a lift back another way."

The TARDIS beeped.

"Don't get jealous" she chided her ship before she stepped onto the platform which the console was mounted on. "I'll pick them up now. Maybe just need a moment," she added as another wave of exhaustion hit her and she sat down on the console and faced outwards, exhausted.

She wondered how her friends were at this point. That other TARDIS had likely landed on Earth, Sheffield. She had programmed that ship to arrive in their time, in Sheffield so they wouldn't have to travel too far on foot. Her friends would help the surviving humans they'd found survive in the 21st century, and hopefully, it wouldn't cause any long term damage to the Web of Time by having humans from the future there, but she doubted they'd go that far. Their knowledge of technology and science would have bordered on time travel mechanics, and they'd know the dangers. At least that was the hope, but she would keep an eye on them nonetheless.

In the meantime, the Doctor thought about her friends.

She knew they would be shaken, hurt by what she had done in order to keep them safe. In many ways, it was similar to what had happened with Rose when she'd sent her back to 2005 when the Dalek Emperor had threatened the Earth. The only difference here was none of her friends knew anything about the Heart of the TARDIS. That was the only bonus. She was about to turn around and set the controls to send the TARDIS to Sheffield, maybe about a year after the others had gotten there, but before she could the TARDIS alarms started blaring.

_Oh no, what now? _

The Doctor was about to check the systems to find out what was causing the alarms to blare, and she had just turned her head over to study the console when three transmat flashes appeared in front of her, and she found three Judoon in her face.

"What?" she said while her three uninvited guests got their bearings.

The lead Judoon who had his helmet off stepped up and loomed over her. "Judoon cold case unit," he declared in his guttural voice. "Fugitive - The Doctor."

The Doctor's eyes widened in fear. They were here for her? _Oh no. _Her other self, the Judoon must have reviewed the records, but why? They weren't renowned for their brainpower. What tipped them off?

"Sentence - whole of life imprisonment."

The Doctor's eyes widened in alarm and horror when the Judoon delivered the sentence.

It just got worse.

"Maximum Security facility."

The Judoon whipped out a small device with a glowing head, and there was a glow and she found herself taken away from her TARDIS and she found herself in a small, cramped cell. The Doctor staggered around, trying to get her bearings before she righted herself. "What?" she whispered, wondering why the Judoon were coming after her now.

At the same time, she cursed herself for revealing to the Judoon who she was the last time she'd met them. True, at the time she was trying to get answers from Gat, but once more she realised her stupidity had landed herself in a mess she would be hard-pressed to get away from. Oh, she hoped when and if she ever regenerated she had the sense to do what her predecessor did, make sure her next self had common sense.

She pushed that aside when she saw a grille with illuminated bars, and she rushed over to it. She peered out and her eyes widened when she saw the stars. "What?"

Oh, what had she done?! Not only had she bungled up the whole thing with the Lone Cyberman, but she had also gotten herself put into prison.


End file.
